How to format your references using the Plant Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Plant Biology. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Ramirez A. (2015) The making of a science evangelist. Science (New York, NY) 348:726.

A journal article with 2 authors

Harrison S.A., Tong F. (2009) Decoding reveals the contents of visual working memory in early visual areas. Nature 458:632–635.

A journal article with 3 authors

Fendorf S., Michael H.A., van Geen A. (2010) Spatial and temporal variations of groundwater arsenic in South and Southeast Asia. Science (New York, NY) 328:1123–1127.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Smith A.D.M., Brown C.J., Bulman C.M., Fulton E.A., Johnson P., Kaplan I.C., Lozano-Montes H., Mackinson S., Marzloff M., Shannon L.J., Shin Y.-J., Tam J. (2011) Impacts of fishing low-trophic level species on marine ecosystems. Science (New York, NY) 333:1147–1150.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Scott D.W. (2008) Color Atlas of Farm Animal Dermatology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

Mauskopf S., Schmaltz T. (Eds) (2012) Integrating History and Philosophy of Science: Problems and Prospects. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Patt Y. (2007) The Transformation Hierarchy in the Era of Multi-core. In: Aluru S, Parashar M, Badrinath R, Prasanna VK (eds) High Performance Computing – HiPC 2007: 14th International Conference, Goa, India, December 18-21, 2007. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 5–5.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Plant Biology.

Blog post

Carpineti A. (2017) Quantum Refrigerator Breakthrough Might Be Crucial For Future Of Computing. IFLScience [online] URL: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/quantum-refrigerator-breakthrough-might-be-crucial-for-future-of-computing/ (accessed 30 October 2018).

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office (2000) Pipeline Safety: The Office of Pipeline Safety Is Changing How It Oversees the Pipeline Industry. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Kramer K.A. (2010) System for Identifying Plankton from the SIPPER Instrument Platform. Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Wagner J. (2017) Pitching Took Root After the Troubles Were Left Behind. New York Times:D3.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Ramirez 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Harrison & Tong 2009; Ramirez 2015).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Harrison & Tong 2009)
Three or more authors: (Smith et al. 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Biology
Abbreviation	Plant Biol. (Stuttg.)
ISSN (print)	1435-8603
ISSN (online)	1438-8677
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Plant Science General Medicine